90 PAGAN MYSTERY PLAYS If so, how could they devote themŽ selves to pagan mystery plays ? Eobertson admits that Jews could never borrow from pagan rituals in that age god Joshua, son of a mythic Miriam, he at least admits that the early " Christists " selected from ancient Jewish superstition, and not from pagan myth, the central figure of their cult, and that they chose for their deity a successor and satellite of Moses with a Hebrew lady for his mother. We may take it for granted, then, that the parent society out of which the Christian Church arose was profoundly and radically Jewish ; and Mr. Eobertson frankly admits as much when he affirms that " it was a Judaic cult that preached circumcision," and that " its apostles with whom Paul was in contact were of a Judaizing description." Here is common ground between myself and him. What I want to know is how it came about that a society of which Jerusalem was the focus, and of which the nucleus and propagandists were Jews and Judaizers, could have been given over to the cult of a solar god, and how they could celebrate mystery plays and dramas in honour of that god; how they can have manufactured that god into " a composite myth " (p. 336), and constructed in his honour a religious system that was " a patchwork of a hundred suggestions drawn from pagan art and ritual usage." For such, we are told (p. 305), was " the Christian system." We are far better acquainted with Jewish belief and ritual during the period B.C. 400-a.d. 100 than we are with that of the pagans. The content of the Greek mysteries is an enigma to our best Hellenists; we know next to nothing of the inside of Mithraism ; for the oriental cults of the late Eoman republic and early empire we are lamentably deficient in writings that might exhibit to us the arcana of their worship and the texture of their beliefs. Not so with Judaism.